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Celeste Augé was born in the backwoods of Northern Ontario, Canada to an Irish mother and French-Canadian father but English was the only language ever spoken at home when she was growing up. When she was twelve her family moved to Ireland. Not too long afterwards, she started secondary school with the Jesuits in Galway and learned to row and to drink.

Celeste developed an intense relationship with poetry after she left school (and the flat expectation that every line of a poem could be analysed ‘correctly’ for an exam). Literary journals started accepting her poems when she was in her twenties, which always took her by surprise. Fiction had kept her sane during her childhood, and poetry helped her make sense of her twenties. After the birth of her son, in the early crazy years, poetry was about the only thing that made sense to her sleep deprived mind. So she indulged, sank into other people’s words, and happily, re-discovered her own. In 2006 she published a chapbook of her poetry from her formative poetry years, called ’Tornadoes for the Weathergirl’.

Over the years Celeste has worked in various jobs – babysitter, waitress, shop assistant, library assistant, girl friday, English literature tutor, community Writer-in-Residence – and now she teaches creative writing to adults and university undergraduates. While still in her twenties, she dropped out of art college and in her thirties she completed an MA in Writing.

Many of the poems drafted while on the MA in Writing ended up in her first full collection of poetry ’The Essential Guide to Flight’, published by Salmon Poetry in 2009. Some of these poems have been read to enthusiastic audiences at poetry readings around Ireland (including The Cúirt International Festival of Literature, various libraries, & as part of Poetry Ireland’s ‘Introductions’). Two of them were shortlisted for a Hennessy Literary Award the same year the collection was published. In 2010 Celeste received an Arts Council of Ireland Literature Bursary to complete her next collection of poetry. She won The Cuirt New Writing Prize for fiction in 2011 and in 2012 Her collection of short stories ‘Fireproof & Other Stories’ was published by Doire Press.

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